Quote:
Originally Posted by lock
So many people bought computers and never used them as was all too hard to type commands you could buy them new second hand.
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My first computer was a TRS-80 Model 1. It ran at 1.77 MHz, had 16k of Ram, and used a cassette tape recorder for storage.
When I first turned it on, there was nothing apperently to do with it because it had no software. It booted BASIC from a Rom, and that was it.
As it turns out though, that was the best because it forced me to learn how to code. I bought some books that contained software as lines of code that you had to type in, one line at a time, error free, then RUN to use, or SAVE to save to a cassette. It took hours to enter lines for some games, and even 2 days to type in a complete Star Trek game. It sounds terrible by today's standards, but it was super-fun for me, and really educational.
I still have that machine as well as a spare Model 1, plus a Model 4, with disk drives, floppies, and yikes - even some cassettes.
And just for fun, I sometimes connect the Model 4, a machine from 1982, to my Network and to the Internet, and use it to run Terminal to connect to Amazon AWS or other servers I am running. So cool.